Home tour features 100-year-old Eastwood gem

1of 21Vezey and Norwood were able to salvage many of the home's original doors, including these French doors that lead to the dining room. The glass panels still have their original wavy glass.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

2of 21Bryan Vezey and Lan Norwood bought the 1915 home in Eastwood about a decade ago and then spent two years renovating the place.﻿Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

3of 21Vezey and Norwood decided to take out the door that separated the two front rooms, creating a small nook perfect for lounging. They added built-in shelves and cabinets to hold books and a television.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

4of 21Vezey and Norwood removed the built-in shelves surrounding the fireplace, then expaned the fireplace to make it a more substantial presence in the front room.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

5of 21This green tile at the base of the fireplace is original to the house.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

6of 21Bryan Vezey stands in an open section of the kitchen, which now features high-end appliances and a wine storage wall.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

7of 21When the house was gutted, some of the original, unpainted brick was exposed in the kitchen. Owners Bryan Vezey and Lan Norwood decided to keep the wall visible as a nod to the home's 100-year history.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

8of 21When the house was gutted, some of the original, unpainted brick was exposed in the kitchen. Owners Bryan Vezey and Lan Norwood decided to keep the wall visible as a nod to the home's 100-year history.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

9of 21In a powder room tucked beneath the stairs, a piece of wooden furniture was converted into a cabinet with a sink.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

20of 21The home's brick exterior was painted sometime in the '80s, Bryan Vezey and Lan Norwood believe - long before they bought the place. A section of the original, unpainted brick can be found in the kitchen.Photo: Craig Hartley, Freelance

Bryan Vezey and Lan Norwood weren't looking for a house to buy. But when Vezey visited some friends in Eastwood one afternoon in 2005, he couldn't help but notice a two-story Craftsman-style place a few streets over. It was dilapidated, but it looked like a good renovation project. And it was for sale.

"I liked what I saw - I saw a lot of potential in it," Vezey said last week, standing in his bright living room, which looks nothing like it did 10 years ago. He and Norwood both liked the house, and they'd gained a little renovation experience when they'd fixed up their Montrose/River Oaks-area townhome. So they bought the Eastwood house and threw themselves into making this East End fixer-upper a home.

The three-bedroom house was built in 1915, and it showed. "It was livable, but time had not been kind to it," Vezey said.

So Vezey, Norwood and their dog, Rocky, moved into the 450-square-foot garage apartment behind the house - and they stayed there for two full years while the house was gutted and rebuilt.

The house now gleams with sunlight, color and 21st-century conveniences, and it'll be featured on this weekend's Eastwood Historic Home Tour, a two-day open house featuring six homes in this 100-year-old neighborhood just east of downtown.

Eastwood was one of Houston's first master-planned subdivisions, and many of its homes date to the 1910s and 1920s. Along with Vezey and Norwood's gem, the tour will highlight a 1916 Craftsman with Spanish influences and a 1923 Foursquare home with a sprawling front porch. It'll also feature a couple of new homes that were designed to fit in seamlessly with homes that are 100 years older.

The neighborhood has evolved in the decade since Vezey and Norwood moved in. Now the East End has become one of Houston's trendiest places to restore an old home.

The whole East End's profile is much higher than it was just five years ago, said Karen Niemeier, who'll serve as docent at the couple's house this weekend. That's partly because of renovation efforts like Vezey and Norwood's. The neighborhood also got a light-rail station earlier this year, and the nearby Esplanade on Navigation offers regular farmers markets and festivals.

When she moved to Eastwood 13 years ago, it was by default, Niemeier said - east of downtown was the only place to find an affordable home inside the Loop. "I think now people are actively looking to move into Eastwood and the East End," she said. "The East End is no longer an afterthought."

Vezey and Norwood have watched the neighborhood change around them. "It's been kind of an organic change, nothing all at once," Vezey said. "As you drive around you'll notice people working on their houses - or you'll see a big construction Dumpster and then you're like, 'Yes!' "

City restrictions preventing townhomes and zero-lot-line development have helped the neighborhood retain its character. The two new homes on this year's tour were designed in a way that respects the neighborhood's history. One is an airplane bungalow with an old-fashioned wraparound porch. The other, with 3,800 square feet, is bigger than its neighbors, but its size doesn't show from the street.

"You would never drive by them and think that they're new construction," Niemeier said. A new house, she said, "can be done in a way that fits with the neighborhood. It doesn't have to be a McMansion. With a little bit of creativity, you don't have to stick out like a sore thumb."

But this weekend's tour primarily features renovated homes from the 1910s, '20s and '30s. Vezey, an attorney, said they'd never done a wholesale redo when they bought their 1915 house. But they wanted to do this one right. They started by taking out some walls and opening up the first floor. An office in the front of the house became an open reading-and-TV nook, just off the main living room. A shower was removed from beneath the stairs, leaving just the original powder room. And the shed kitchen, which had been added sometime in the '60s, got knocked down entirely and replaced with a new addition.

Now the kitchen - with its Carrara marble counters, high-end appliances and a wall devoted to wine - is where guests gravitate during parties, Vezey said. Double doors lead from the kitchen to a screened-in back porch with a slate-tile floor. Another set of doors leads from the porch back to the dining room, creating a perfect path for guests to circulate.

"We'll sometimes eat out here" at the heavy wooden table, Vezey said. But they spend the most time upstairs, on the balcony they added during the renovation. "It's my favorite spot," Vezey said of the covered perch among the treetops where they can sip wine and relax at the end of the day.

Downstairs, Vezey and Norwood laid a new wood floor over the old one. But the oak floors upstairs are original, as is the wooden staircase that leads to the three bedrooms.

Also original: a brick wall in the kitchen, which the men discovered when sheetrock was removed. The front of the house had been painted, but the brick revealed how the home's exterior looked in 1915.

Norwood, who works for Hewlett-Packard, also is an artist with a studio at Silver Street Studios, and the 2,300-square-foot house is filled with his bright, abstract paintings and the work of other Houston-area artists, many of them friends.

As the East End gets redeveloped, "the wave of luxury townhomes between us and downtown is getting closer and closer," Vezey said. But deed restrictions will protect this historic neighborhood from that sort of change. And living in an old, thriving neighborhood has enriched the couple's life in Houston, Vezey said. They're part of a monthly wine-tasting group ("it's really just wine drinking"), and a few years ago, Vezey was president of the Eastwood Civic Association.

"We've been more neighborhood-oriented here than we've been anywhere else," he said, "because people are so social here."

Alyson Ward is a features writer for the Chronicle. She started her reporting career at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and has spent more than a decade writing about the people and places of Texas.

Alyson has examined the impact of wind energy on West Texas ranchers, tracked domestic homicides through the Texas justice system and studied the controversy over single-sex education. She has also written about love letters, baton twirlers, Airstream trailers, homecoming mums, vacuum cleaners, male strippers and pet weight loss. She is a graduate of Baylor University and the University of Texas at Arlington.